In the time that I’ve written for LoCO, the wholesale price of cannabis has dropped by way more than 50%. Much as I appreciate the price break, the collapse is painful to watch. People are not handling it well, but they don’t need me to remind them that prohibition is an ugly way to make a living or to make fun of them for their excesses. Besides, the free market and legalization will change things around here more than anything I could ever say in an editorial.

I know that this is a hard time for people, and that a lot of people around here will have to find something else to do with their lives. I know how challenging that can be, and I sympathize with my neighbors who are going through that right now. In fact, I’m right there with you. Legalization has cost me my job too.

Much of what I write, here at LoCO, revolves around the excesses and the mythology of the black market cannabis industry. Now that the industry has collapsed in the face of full legalization, the myths quickly fade into legends, as the excesses evaporate and disappear. I’m not here to write folklore about prohibition, although that’s not necessarily a bad idea, but that’s not why you read LoCO.

Legalization has been my issue since 1988, when I wrote the first of many letters to my elected officials about it, and my first Letter to the Editor about it appeared in the Akron Beacon Journal. In 1990 I got my first paid writing gig when the Lincoln Journal Star, in Lincoln NE invited me to write a guest editorial about the economic benefits of hemp as a cash crop for Nebraska’s farmers.

In Boston, I founded and edited Mass Grass, the official newsletter, and a central organizing tool, of Mass Cann, The Massachusetts Cannabis Reform Coalition, the lead organization in that state’s legalization movement. In a sense, I’ve had a career working for legalization. It didn’t pay much, but I met some great people, had amazing experiences and smoked a lot of terrific weed. I really loved the work because I believe in it deeply, and felt I had something to contribute.

Now that prohibition is over, at least here in Humboldt County, there’s not much point in advocating for legalization any more, at least not locally. Legalization is just a fact of life now, and for too many people around here, it’s a painful fact of life. You don’t need to hear me say “I told you so,” and I don’t kick people when they’re down. Watching this whole community hit the windshield in slow motion, as the industry slams into a brick wall just makes me cringe. I can’t write about this anymore, at least not for the people who live here. It’s completely unnecessary cruelty.

That doesn’t really leave me much to write about for LoCO. Most of the things I used to complain about have gotten a lot better since the market collapsed. I didn’t hear nearly so much traffic on my road this past year. I heard a lot less heavy equipment, chainsaws and generators this year too. I didn’t get run off the road by any of those 50 cubic yard soil loads this year, but I have seen more litter, especially more soil bags, along our roadways. The smugness is gone too. In its place, I hear a lot of pathetic self-pity that would be funny if it weren’t so sad, and it weren’t my neighbors.

I’m grateful for the relief from the noise, but I would rather clean up roadside trash than write about it, and I’m not ready to immerse myself into the cesspool that is Humboldt County politics enough to write a weekly opinion column about it, so it’s over. Hank isn’t interested in my critiques of media and the internet, and I’m not interested in beating a dead horse, so we’ll call it done. I’ll continue to publish my blog, but you will no longer see it at LoCO and it will no longer remain so Humboldt-centric. It might even get funny again. You never can tell.

I’ll miss the exposure, and I’ll miss the checks, but I’ll never miss prohibition or the War on Drugs. It’s high time for me to do something else with my life, anyway, and that’s probably true for most of us. I’m sure there’s better things ahead for all of us, but we’ll never get there, unless we let go of what’s holding us back. My blog remains one click away, and you can still hear me every Monday morning on KMUD. It’s been fun, LoCO, but bye for now.

While pot industry shills like Hezekiah Allen warn of mass unemployment and economic hardship without continued taxpayer subsidized price supports for marijuana, we should realize by now that drug dealers will say anything to keep the cash rolling in. In truth, government price support programs for marijuana don’t support our local economy, here in Humboldt County, so much as they suppress it.

The War on Drugs created a windfall of profits for anyone who produces marijuana. This windfall buried our real economic potential, which we never really developed because pot paid so much better. We’ve become a marijuana mono-culture dependent on corrupt politicians, violent cops and greedy drug dealers all working together to exploit and oppress the American people. That’s not an economy; that’s a crime. Besides, most of the so-called “jobs” in the marijuana industry, aren’t even considered part of the economy.

Most people who make a living from marijuana, don’t pay into Social Security, and aren’t covered by Workman’s Comp, so they don’t count as being “employed.” Since they aren’t looking for work or collecting unemployment, they don’t count as “unemployed” either. Thanks to the War on Drugs, the marijuana industry has become a black hole that sucks people and money out of the economy and leaves a trail of poverty, addiction and death in it’s wake.

We don’t have prosperity here. We have organized crime. What’s the difference? In prosperity: people have jobs and homes and their kids get enough to eat and learn how to succeed in the world. In organized crime, people go missing and turn up dead, honest work is for suckers, and kids become addicted to drugs, and commit suicide. The difference is pretty stark really. The only way to avoid seeing the difference is to measure the cash flow exclusively. Even from that perspective, organized crime doesn’t really look like prosperity; organized crime just looks as attractive as prosperity to people who don’t care about anything but money.

Here, you could always make more money growing weed than you could make doing anything else, so growing marijuana became a “no brainer” for people around here. Consequently, we have a lot of “no brainer” type people who feel entitled to middle-class incomes and lifestyles, but have no education or skills outside of herb gardening. We’ve been overrun by dull, greedy people who believe that cannabis is the only thing of value. They don’t mind being one-trick-ponies, even if it is a kind of a dirty trick, but most of us have more potential than that.

It’s been about 10 years since Anna Hamilton first asked the question: “What’s After Pot?” The unanimous response from the community has been “More Pot!” Instead of beginning a movement to diversify our economy, people treated Anna’s wake-up call as the shot from a starting pistol that signaled the beginning of the greenrush. Everyone doubled-down on dope, but now the pressure is on.

Small growers get squeezed, and everyone’s profit margins shrink, as big players with deep pockets gamble for control of the legal cannabis market. As more states legalize cannabis, and bring industrial scale production online, the price of raw cannabis continues to drop. Downward pressure on the price of cannabis opens up more economic potential by multiplying the opportunities for value added cannabis products. The new openness of the legal market means that there’s a whole world of cannabis lifestyle products and service tie-ins to explore. However, lower prices for raw cannabis means that Humboldt County’s marijuana windfall will evaporate.

There’s plenty of economic potential here in SoHum for anyone with the imagination, ingenuity and drive to realize it. Unfortunately, 40 years of cannabis windfall has pretty much bred the imagination, ingenuity and drive out of us. Instead of facing reality and working together as a community to diversify and humanize our economy, we’re all busy milking the War on Drugs right to the last drop. The question is: What is the last drop for you? Is it $800 a pound? $500? $300? How low can you go, and still make money from weed in Humboldt County?

You can get more for your weed if you sell it retail, and work it into our tourism appeal, but then you have to be prepared for a whole bunch of unruly young people coming here to get high. We have that now, and it’s the thing people complain most about. If we want this area to remain famous for herb, and you still want to make a living from it, we’ll need to be more accommodating to pot smokers of all stripes, especially the young and unkempt.

To sell herb retail, in a legal market, Humboldt County needs to be as accommodating to unkempt hippies as fast food retailers are to obese people, or bartenders are to alcoholics. It comes with the territory. If the idea of graciously serving hippies with dogs and backpacks and making them feel at home seems repugnant to you, maybe you weren’t cut out for the marijuana industry after all. Around here, we don’t recognize our economic potential. Instead, we call the cops on it, beat it senseless on the town square, and convene town meetings on how to get rid of it.

If we suffer massive unemployment or economic hardship because of falling cannabis prices, it is only because the windfall from the War on Drugs blinded us to our true economic potential and robbed us of our moxie. If we succeed in this new legal environment, it will be because enough of us realized that we have other skills and talents that we never called on, because we always had marijuana. We may find that those skills and talents lead us in new directions and towards more satisfying lives. In that respect, falling marijuana prices just might be the best thing that ever happened to us.

This past week, officers from our local VFW post changed the locks on the doors of the Garberville Vets Hall to prevent the building from being used as an emergency shelter during our recent spate of severe weather. We have no other shelters in Southern Humboldt, and hundreds of people live outside around here, largely due to the lack of housing, economic forces, and the nature of the cannabis industry.

A lot of these people currently work regular jobs in town that don’t pay enough to afford a decent place to live. More still, work in the cannabis industry. Of course we also have people who suffer from illness, mental or otherwise, that prevent them from thriving, and people who simply cannot cope with, or have given up on society, and/or life. It’s much too large of a population to make generalizations about, except to say that too many people in SoHum have too few housing options.

We have a perverse attitude towards poverty in SoHum, although I don’t think SoHum is unique in this perversion. We try to punish poverty with more poverty. We attempt to drive poor people from our midst by withholding services, and demonstrating our hostility and disdain for them. It never works. Every year we have more poor people, and every year, the hostility increases. Isn’t it about time we faced the fact that not everyone in SoHum can be rich or middle-class?

Try as we like, we cannot run a town exclusively for the benefit of the rich and the middle-class. In fact, almost no-one in SoHum would be rich or middle-class were it not for a hell of a lot of poor people. The black-market marijuana industry makes a few people rich, but it makes a lot of people poor. Most of the money that comes into SoHum by way of the cannabis industry, comes from poor people. Besides that, poor people do most of the work necessary to produce and distribute black-market cannabis as well, but the secrecy of the industry, and a community in denial, demand that they remain unheard and unrecognized, if not, unseen.

Here in SoHum, not unlike the rest of the world, we have two kinds of people. A) people who make their living from what they own, and B) people who make their living from what they do. Around here, the thing that people own, that makes money, is land, and the thing that people do, to make money, is grow weed. The people who own land, the “owners” if you will, fall broadly into two categories: A) the dope yuppies, who got here first, and their kids. These people still think they are God’s greatest gift to humanity because they invented marijuana and hold a patent on it. They think that the rest of us are just lucky to get high, at any price, and that we should be nothing but thankful to them for it.

Whenever you hear the word “community” used in Southern Humboldt, it refers exclusively to this group of people. Increasingly though, as the dope yuppies retire, they sell out to: B) large-scale distributors from out of state, who send managers, to aggressively expand production, often at their neighbor’s expense.

Both the dope yuppies, and their successors, the big distributors, need help from the “Doers” in order for their land to make money. They need workers, lots of them, but not the normal 9-5 type workers. They need people who can drop everything and move to a remote piece of land, where they camp-out all summer while they do all of the work necessary to turn piles of soil into piles of cannabis.

These workers need to work hard in the hot sun, deal with primitive conditions, keep a secret, know the cannabis industry, and appreciate good weed. The pay is negotiable, and often based on a share of the harvest. Usually, the people who want these jobs have exhausted other options. Growers know who they’re looking for. They recognize desperation, and take advantage of it when they can.

The people who want these jobs know that if you work hard, volunteer a lot, and suck-up to the right people, you can get off of the streets and into some abandoned trailer or shack with plenty of weed, and maybe even a few bucks in your pocket. If you’ve been convicted of a felony, didn’t finish high-school or have big gaps in your employment record, this might be the best job you can get. As a result, a lot of people come here, smile a lot, and try to find something nice to say about everyone.

“Oh, this is such a kind, wonderful community.” and “We feel so blessed to have found this place and want to contribute to it in any way we can” they say, as they help clean-up after a music festival. This proven strategy has helped many young “doers” find underground work and substandard housing where they produce most of the marijuana grown in SoHum. It has also contributed greatly to the swollen egos of the dope yuppies, who have come to expect lots of free labor and ass-kissings from hapless strangers looking for work.

As the cannabis industry continues to grow, so grows this workforce. By now, they comprise the majority of the population of SoHum. These people make Humboldt County prosperous, and they pay a lot of taxes. However, they are not protected by workman’s comp; OSHA never inspects their workplace, nor will they receive unemployment benefits if they lose their job, and inevitably, they lose their job, and have to start from scratch.

So, we have a large workforce of people who don’t mind camping for extended periods of time, in an industry with a high turnover rate. In this business, generally, your boss and your landlord are the same person, so when you lose your job, you lose your home too. This happens a lot. The cannabis industry becomes a trap, and the workers in it rarely get ahead, so eventually, they quit, or get fired, but instead of complaining, they keep their mouth shut, and continue singing the praises of “this kind, wonderful community,” while they attempt to brown-nose their way into another job.

It shouldn’t surprise us one bit that we have lots of people camping around Garberville, because that’s the nature of the cannabis industry. The cannabis industry needs workers who know how to “rough it” even if local merchants prefer to cater to a different clientele. Most of the people who live here in SoHum have no use for dashboard hula dancers, makeovers or $25 dollar-a-plate entrees. They need a campground, affordable housing, cheap eats, a place to charge their cell phone and wifi, not that anyone cares.

Nor should it surprise us to hear so many praises for “this kind, wonderful community” from people who enjoy so few benefits from their participation in it. How could “this kind, wonderful community” exploit them more? In truth, land owners use the veil of secrecy that surrounds the cannabis industry to sweep displaced workers under the rug, and we see how “kind and wonderful” this community really is, by how it treats the least fortunate among us, on the coldest nights of the year.

So who are the 1%, and why do they want all of your money? Don’t they have enough already? Why do they always want more, and why don’t they do something about global climate change or the rest of the environmental crisis? The fact is, the world looks very different from the top of the economy, than it does from the bottom, or even the middle, so let’s try to see it from their perspective.

The 1% take opulence for granted. Their consumption is limited only by their own imagination, not lack of resources. These people all have way more money than they can spend, and most of what they own, makes money, so they keep getting richer, no matter how much they spend. Still, they need a robust economy way more than you do. They need the economy, because the economy protects them from us. They use it to keep the riffraff in line. At the top of the economy, profit has less to do with making money, than it does with maintaining order, stability, and growth.

Order matters at the top. As solid, and resilient as our economic system seems, the 1% knows that without strict discipline, the capitalist system would collapse like a house of cards. Those 1%ers, who have become accustomed to opulence, know that the rest of us would lynch them if we knew how bad they were fucking us. So we must have cops, and standing armies, who will shoot to kill anyone who steps out of line. That’s what “order” means.

That’s why the military industrial complex, and the prison industrial complex form such a large part of our economy. Even though these endless stupid wars we get into, and the money we spend keeping millions of people in prison for drugs, seems like a tremendous waste of resources to the rest of us, to the 1% who control this economy, it is more important to punish disobedience, no matter how pointless and arbitrary the rule, than it is to reward obedience. The 1% never skimp on the guns, bombs, soldiers or cops.

All of those cops and soldiers need to get paid. That gets expensive, even for the 1%, so they make sure that we pay them. When the government has enough money from taxing working people to pay for enough cops, guns and soldiers to keep everyone in line, they call that “stability”. When we pay for our own oppression, and their protection, “order” becomes profitable, and self-sustaining, resulting in “stability”.

Even though we, the 99%, pay for those cops, soldiers and armaments, they invariably serve the interests of the 1%, and the 1% always find something for them to do. It’s not pretty, but it keeps them busy. The 1% likes to keep the rest of us busy too, and that isn’t pretty either. Whether its drilling for oil in the Gulf of Mexico, contaminating groundwater in rural PA with fracking chemicals, or removing mountaintops in WV, its all ugly work, and doing it doesn’t make us any more attractive.

The 1% need to keep this economy growing, because that’s how they keep us busy. They give us jobs and incomes to keep us from killing them, and turn us into obedient servants. As the population grows, as unrest grows, as dissatisfaction grows, as anger grows, so too must the economy. Every year the pressure to earn money must increase, because that pressure, more so than the cops and soldiers, serves to maintain order and stability, by keeping us busy. As more people compete for fewer resources, the amount of resources necessary to maintain order and stability increases as well, so growth insures stability.

You see, to the 1%, the rest of us just look like so many goats and sheep. We are just livestock to them. For them, the economy acts as a domestication program. As long as they can keep the economy rolling along, we will do whatever they want. We’ll go to school to learn the material, at our own cost, then take an unpaid internship to acquire the skills, and then beg them to hire us, and accept whatever they offer. It took no small amount of effort to reduce us to this level of submissiveness and obedience, and they’ve been at it for some time.

“Flexibility” they call it. We have a very “flexible” workforce here in the US. We’ll do pretty much anything for a job. Relocate? No problem, Pay cut? Sure, I’m a team player. No benefits? OK, I’m healthy enough. Unpaid overtime? Yeah, I always give 110%, just because I love my job, no matter how bad it sucks. How did it come to this? When did Americans turn into such pathetic little boot-licks, and why?

The economy did this to us. The 1% uses the global economy to make us more obedient, docile, and trusting, all of the traits you might look for in a dog. The 1% has exploited the resources of the world, laid waste to the global ecosystem, and expropriated the content of our lives, for the primary purpose of domesticating the human race, to make us into obedient servants. The 1% uses the economy to turn us, the wolf at their door, into the dog tied up in their yard..

It takes a lot of energy to keep us all busy, and we destroy a lot of the environment in the process, but to the 1%, that is a small price to pay for the order, stability and security that a robust economy provides them. That’s why the 1% completely fails to address global climate change. We don’t burn so much energy because we need it to live decent lives, we burn so much energy because they need it, to control our lives. To the 1%, the 99% represents a much more immediate threat than global climate change. So, for the 1%, order, stability, and growth will always take precedence over the environment.

Despite the fact that all money flows toward the 1%, we must understand that the vast majority of economic activity in the world is not about making the 1% richer, the purpose of most economic activity is to keep us all too busy, and too dependent, to challenge or even question their power. As long as we stay focused on money, and will settle for a paycheck, we remain loyal servants of the 1%.

That’s why the 1% get so concerned about the unemployment rate. None of them work at jobs, but for them, full employment means order, stability, and growth. Order, stability and growth may sound like good things, but you should always remember what they mean. “Order” means everyone does what they are told, and almost nobody dares to step out of line. “Stability” means that tomorrow, everyone will get up in the morning and do it again, just like today, yesterday, last week, last month or last year, even though we all hate doing it and its destroying the planet. “Growth” means that every year you will pay more, and work harder for less.

This human domestication program they call “the economy” produces order, stability and growth, for the 1%, at the expense of the environment, our quality of life, and our humanity. Neither our lives nor our environment will improve as long as we continue to serve their interests. That’s a view of the economy, from the perspective of the 1%, that’s On The Money.

I received an email recently from an editor at Fifth Estate magazine. They asked me to revise this piece and update the statistics for publication in their Summer, 2012 edition. I think it improved the piece quite a bit. I encourage all of you to subscribe, or at least pick up the new Summer 2012 edition of Fifth Estate, which should be on newsstands any day now.

On The Money

Financial Advice for the Working Class

Unemployment

You can’t turn on the news these days without hearing about unemployment. The national unemployment rate hovers at about 8.3%, although experts agree that the number of people out-of-work far exceeds that figure. The 8.3% figure only reflects the number of people actually looking for work. It does not count the growing number of people who have stopped looking for work.

This “not working, not looking for work” segment of the population might really be on to something. Jobs don’t pay like they used to. Fewer jobs than ever actually provide a living wage. Housing costs came unhinged from wages years ago. Affordable housing used to mean that you had a decent place to live that cost no more than one-quarter of your monthly wage. How many of you can say you have affordable housing by that standard?

Most employers expect workers to have a phone, reliable transportation, and a presentable wardrobe whether or not the job pays enough to cover those costs. Workers often make these expenses a priority over their physical needs, sacrificing their own health for their employers profit. A full time job scarcely leaves workers enough time or energy to prepare healthy meals, further compromising health. For this meager existence, workers trade roughly half of their waking hours, and 60-80% of their life energy.

When you think about it that way, its a wonder anyone wants a job. So, lets look at these people who have stopped looking for work. How do they do it? How do they get by? What are they doing that’s working for them? Are they dealing drugs, robbing banks or hacking computers? They can’t all have the talent to deal, rob and hack profitably.

Half of the world’s population lives on less than $1 a day. Why can’t we? If living in a storm sewer and eating spit-roasted rat isn’t better than working for a living, its gotta be close. Life is too short to spend it in self-imposed slavery chasing an allusive, and mostly extinct middle-class illusion.

Most of us already know that we’re never going to be “super-rich”, but if you no longer aspire to be middle-class, a job no longer seems like such a necessary evil, and evil it is. If you can get out from under your job, you can reclaim your time, your energy, and your freedom. Three things working people have sold too cheaply for too long, all of them more valuable than money.

Face it, the biggest problem the world faces right now is too much money. Too much money caused the housing meltdown. Too much money caused the Fukushima meltdown and too much money caused the polar ice-cap meltdown. We’ve really got to stop thinking about how to make more money, and figure out how to live without it.

See, we’ve got about 7 billion people on the planet, and right now, damn near every one of them wants to make money. So they all start making stuff out of the rocks, trees, and animals they find around them, to sell for money. People who do well at this soon have more money that they need, but they don’t stop making stuff, instead, they expand. They buy machines that help them make more stuff faster and cheaper.

Soon, they have even more money, so they loan it to other people to expand their businesses, so they can make more stuff faster and cheaper. That way, they make even more money, but nobody wants their money just sitting around doing nothing. No, everyone wants their extra money to make even more money, and most people don’t care how it happens, as long as it happens.

So, all of this money really, really, wants make even more money out of whatever rocks, plants and animals that are still left on the planet, creating our present situation: We have rapidly increasing amounts of money chasing dwindling numbers of rocks, plants and animals, all over the world.

Today, this money exerts tremendous pressure on all of us. It constantly works to find new ways to extract more from us, and the planet, every day. It never rests and does not care about anything else but making more of itself. Money has become a monster. Stay away from it.

From this perspective, unemployment is not our most serious economic problem. Unemployment is the solution to our most serious economic problem. Don’t try to make money, that just exacerbates our global problems. Just find someplace to live and something to eat. If you can’t find a better way to do something than with money, consider that a failure of imagination.

We cannot afford to be productive workers any longer. Our own industriousness got us into this mess. The more productive we become as workers, the faster capitalists extract resources from the commons, and the more pollution the whole process creates. As a result, the whole world becomes impoverished, polluted and enslaved while a few people live ridiculously opulent lifestyles. Been there, done that.

We deserve a planet full of trees, rocks and animals, and we deserve the time and energy to enjoy them. Let them keep their soul-sucking, planet-raping, low-wage, no-benefit, endless grind of a job to themselves. Do something different with your life. Spit roasted rat is not half bad. There’s a view of the unemployment problem that’s On The Money.

This letter appears in this weeks edition (8-9-2011) of our local weekly newspaper. I wrote it in response to a letter by Loreen Eliason, who used her letter to complain about homeless people in Garberville.

Dear Editor,

I thought wisdom came with age. Isn’t that why we call old people “elders” and respect them, even though they don’t do much but suck up social-security and medicare dollars.

They’re supposed to be smart, right? At least smart enough to retire before the economy collapsed, smart enough to buy homes before the housing bubble and smart enough to take jobs back when they paid enough to afford one. They were smart enough to arrive before ravenous locusts destroyed the environment and wrecked the economy.

Actually, they bear some resemblance to those ravenous locusts of the Populux age. I refer of course to the people who lived at the pinnacle of American post-war hyper-consumption. Yeah, today’s old people look just like those ravenous locusts, only older, fatter and crankier. The people who drove 25 ft long cars, dripping with chrome,

put redwood decks on their above ground pools,

and filled our landfills with every imaginable consumer product, also gave us global warming, nuclear waste, smog, and the most insanely unsustainable lifestyle in the history of humanity.

They also profited from the housing bubble, sold out the unions and take advantage of cheap labor by shopping at Wal-Mart and hiring day laborers. They skimmed the cream and then sucked up the foam too.

They should write a book titled “How to screw your planet and your progeny for the next ten generations” That’s some serious wisdom there. No one in the history of humanity has ever been so qualified to write that book, and no one in the future will ever have the opportunity again, thanks to them. If we ever find a new planet to pillage, we’ll need that book. Until then, maybe we don’t need to hear so much from them.

At least that’s how I felt after reading the words of Loreen Eliason in The Independent last week. This woman has the nerve to complain about how young people are ruining this town for her granddaughter, that young people don’t deserve a place to use the restroom and should be driven out of town. She calls them “homeless by choice.” Thanks to the aforementioned locusts, young people today don’t have the same choices they once did.

No longer do we have blue-collar jobs that pay decent wages. No longer do home prices reflect local wages. No longer can we say “fill er up” at the gas station for under $10. No longer can poor hippies afford to buy land here. We live in a different world.

While she admits “sure I did drugs back in the day, and I still love my cocktails” she condemns young people for doing the same. Was there a particular day when drug use was OK? Does that make it OK to condemn anyone who uses drugs on a different day? Her generation went shirtless, back when they were skinny, every bit as much as young kids today, and crotchety old drunk ladies complained then too. Some things never change

These kids got a raw deal, and it gets rawer every day. Until you old people are ready to sell your homes for something like what you paid for them, you can expect to see lots of homeless people around, and I wouldn’t count on them dressing for you. They don’t owe you anything, and if I were you, I wouldn’t give them any more good reasons to resent you.

We sure do work hard don’t we? American worker productivity has risen 106% in the last 20yrs. At the same time, real wages have fallen by 6%. Clearly we don’t mind working harder even when we ‘re not getting paid for it. The average American, even after the economic melt-down, still works more than 50 hours a week, or about half of all waking hours. Far more than the average medieval peasant. Don’t we have anything better to do?

I know they call us the working-class, because we work, but why do we work? More importantly, why do we work for them? By them I mean “the job creators”, the multimillionaires who have engineered our society. Specifically, why do we hope to work for them so much that we excuse them from paying their fair share of taxes, in the hopes that they might create a few jobs? We talk about these jobs like they were angels from heaven, but if you’ve ever worked at one, you know that most jobs suck.

We treat work as a moral obligation. We call it “the work ethic”. It doesn’t matter if the work has any meaning to you, does any good in the world, if it’s work, by golly you should do it, whether you get paid or not. Why should we feel this way about work?

Many people feel a strong moral obligation to their family, but they don’t despise people who don’t have a family. Some people feel a strong moral obligation to to their church, but they don’t hate me for sleeping-in on Sunday. They just want to share “the good news.” Work is different. People with jobs resent those without.

That’s always the first insult hurled at the poor…They’re lazy. They don’t want to work. If they had a “work ethic”, they’d go get low paying jobs, doing hard labor, under dangerous conditions. We resent the poor for not working, even though most of them do work, because we all resent working so much, ourselves.

So, lets face that fact. Work sucks! We need good reasons to motivate us to work. We need to get paid. In the last 30 years, the calculus of work has shifted a lot. Wages have declined substantially. Fewer jobs offer health benefits, and fewer still offer long term security. After a decade of hyper-inflated home prices, fewer workers see home ownership as a realistic aspiration. As the method-actor might say, “What’s our motivation?”

Do we treat the people who really work hard, for low wages, like fruit pickers, farm workers or food service people, with reverence? Do they gain social standing for their obvious strong moral character? Hardly. We do everything we can to make them invisible. We don’t want to see poor hard working people any more than we want to see poor unemployed people. So, if you can’t afford a decent place to live and a healthy diet on your salary, and society is going to treat you like the scum of the earth anyway, why work at all?

When your job doesn’t pay enough to cover all of the expenses of having a job, which include a phone, transportation, wardrobe, decent housing, and a healthy diet, your job slowly consumes you. The longer you work those jobs, the more your quality of life suffers, and the more you subsidize your employers business with your own life force. Do you really feel morally obligated to sacrifice your life for capitalism, while your boss pockets the profits? This makes no sense. So, you can’t really blame people for not wanting to work, especially when the pay is low and the conditions suck.

So, maybe people don’t really need to work so much. Back in the ’70s I visited Tomorrowland at Disneyworld. Back then they promised a future full of leisure time, thanks to the proliferation of labor saving technology. The animatronic “Father” of the futuristic family of the “year 2000” only worked about 25 hrs a week, to enjoy a futuristic approximation of ’50s era material wealth. What happened to all of this leisure time we were supposed to have?

According to Disney, “Dad” spent that 25hrs in front of a computer screen at home. Today “Dad” probably does spend 25hrs in front of a computer screen at home, but that’s in addition to, not instead of, the 50+ hrs he spends at the office. That Disney experience influenced me a lot. I prepared to enjoy a life of leisure. I cultivate a lot of rewarding hobbies, and value my time quite highly.

On the other hand, most of what passes for work in this culture should really be best left undone. For instance:

Every single huge industrial accident, like the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the Bhopal chemical plant explosion, or the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan, happened at work. A lot of unemployed people fish in the Gulf for direct sustenance, working people ruined that. People do all kinds of crazy shit at work, just because they get paid. Including…

Deep water oil exploration and nuclear power plants. Talk about crazy shit we could all live without.

If we stopped all oil drilling and closed down all of the nuclear power plants, the planet would thank us, and our quality of life would undoubtedly improve. We really wouldn’t miss that energy either. They would have just used it for a lot of other work better left undone. Like:

Defense industry jobs. Do we really need more bombers, guns and missiles? We’ve got hundreds of B52 bombers sitting out on the desert in Arizona, thousands of tanks, trucks and military vehicles of all sorts, packed in cosmoline, filling cavernous warehouses all over this country. We have tens of millions of rounds of ammunition, millions of tons of bombs, and thousands of nuclear warheads. God help us if we even come close to using up all of this stuff.

The Military. “When the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail” We have a hammer. We hammered Vietnam. We hammered Iraq. We hammered Afghanistan. Has it done us any good? Maybe we don’t need such a big hammer. Maybe we’re all such hammerheads, that we don’t need a national hammer at all.If we just gave all of those leftover weapons to the American people, No one would dare fuck with us!

Advertizing. Try to imagine a world where no one tried to sell you anything you didn’t need. This would take out 95% of the entertainment industry as well. No more TV, except community access, no more commercial hits, just your local musicians., actors and artists doing work that means something to them. Marketing, data mining, consumer behavior research even most psychology jobs would disappear. Some people get paid to design advertizing that helps your kid overcome your objections to sugary cereals and fad toys. Those people really should find something else to do with their lives, don’t you think?

Teachers. No one in this culture knows how to live sustainably on this planet. Why waste so much of our children’s time conveying a bankrupt culture to them? They couldn’t possibly screw up as bad as we have, and shouldn’t think of their elders as anything more than a cautionary example of what happens when you spend too much time in school and not enough time living in the world.

Now you might think, “Those are good, high-paying professional jobs.”, but in fact we would inhabit a much better world if these people just spent the day drinking cheap booze in the park. So when you see someone drinking cheap booze in the park, remember, it could be worse. They could be at work.

What People Say:

If you haven't read john hardin's blog before, prepare to be shocked. I always am. (I can't help but enjoy it though...at least when I'm not slapping my hands on my computer desk and yelling at him.) He's sort of a local Jon Stewart only his writing hurts more because it is so close to people and places I love. Kym Kemp
...about, On The Money, The Collapsing Middle Class
... I think he really nails it, the middle class is devolving back into the working class. Pretty brilliant, IMO. Juliet Buck, Vermont Commons http://www.vtcommons.org/blog/middle-class-or-first-world-subsistence
BLOGS WE WATCH: John Hardin’s humorous, inappropriate, and sometimes antisocial SoHum blog is a one-of-a-kind feast or famine breadline banquet telling it like it is—or at least how it is through Mr. Hardin’s uniquely original point of view with some off-the-wall poetic licensing and colorful pics tossed in for good measure. For example, how it all went from this to that and how it all came about like the hokey pokey with your right foot out. You get the idea. Caution: this isn’t for everybody, especially those without a bawdy, bawdry, and tacky sense of humor. You know who you are. We liked it. (From the Humboldt Sentinel http://humboldtsentinel.com/2011/12/16/weekly-roundup-for-december-16-2011/)